Barack Obama and the Crisis of Utopia

Obama has played with fire and is now getting burnt. But like a radical who just "likes to watch the world burn" (as Alfred the butler put it in the latest installment of "The Dark Knight), Obama knows only one trick: To try to put out the fire with gasoline.

Faced with serious international crises, Obama returned like Johnny One Note to the UN podium to unveil his newest Ode to UN-reality, a warmed over day-old tart, gooey, syrupy sweet and stale. You know its bad when the French president turns to his super-model girlfriend and goes, "Damn - now that's utopian."

Obama is currently suffering from what one might call "the split screen effect." Earlier this year, while Obama was delivering a soaring teleprompteresque oratory on nuclear disarmament, the North Pacific leader of the Sharks was playing War Games with three-stage Typo-dong missiles. Now Obama's renewed call for unilateral nuclear disarmament comes with the Mad Mullahs flipping their hole card: An unknown nuclear reactor at Qom! (Apparently named after General Zod's long lost brother.) One can almost hear the Russians in the background, "Not hungry?"

The recurring problem for Obama is how to go from campaign mode to executive mode. The enemies of the United States are preying upon his empty platitudes as a sign of weakness. Obama, on the other hand, does not know how to do anything but talk. And his favorite topic? Himself, naturally.

Apparently, Obama thinks international relations is something like The Oprah Winfrey Show where we all sit down on a couch and cry it out with a box of kleenexes. Meanwhile, the terrorists and dictators are busy planting plastique under the coffee table.

From the apparent naivete of his foreign relations policy, to his continual crisis-mongering at home, the fusion of utopian rhetoric followed by real "narrative breaker" crises, combined with the administration's emphasis on imaginary crises, has brought the Obama team to a real crossroads. They can continue down the politically self-destructive road they are on, or they can reverse course and return to political reality.

That political reality? America is a mostly conservative nation, and the world is definitely a dangerous place.

But whatever is a community agitator to do? Obama was trained as a disrupter, hung out with disrupters, and likely will go down as a disrupter. But hey, at least Frau Pelosi will like him.

For Obama to reverse course, the one-trick pony of his presidency is going to have to learn a new trick. His constant insistence on "crisis" has turned the people against the agent provocateur. How does the agitator now soothe the same people he has relentlessly shaken like a beehive? When one can no longer capitalize on a crisis, do you manufacture more crises or do you address the actual ones like responsible adults?

The status quo is unsustainable, says the presidency. Yeah, but so is leftist lunacy.